On August 25 2010, I defended my Master’s thesis on Information Architecture and thereby concluded five years of studies at Aalborg University. The thesis was entitled “Bringing Fashionality to Life – Research and Design within the Fashion Ecology”.
My bachelor studies in culture and language studies gave me a wire range of linguistic, semantic and communicative skills, and Information Architecture gave me the possibility to stir-fry this with my flair for computers. I chose to take on a Master’s in IA because I like how the field is placed right in the middle of a series of disciplines such as user experience design, project management, usability testing and interface design, which are all areas I find interesting and enjoy working with as a designer. I like to design navigation and work flows, interfaces and site structures (I have a soft spot for OmniGraffle!) and hopefully tons of other cool things I will discover through experience. I also love doing research and user studies.
Information architecture encompasses a wide range of problems. But regardless of the specific context or objectives of a given information architecture project, our concern is always with creating structures to facilitate effective communication. This notion is the core of our discipline. – Jesse James Garrett
Internship Cycles
During my 8th semester I went to work with three different Danish companies in three-week cycles. These were meant to resemble a “traditional” internship semester and gave me the opportunity to work in a more case-based environment with a high focus on getting things done and presented to the ones in charge. I learned a lot about myself in relation to my future role as a designer of information architecture. I worked with the Municipal District of Aalborg, the communication department of Region Nord and NetDansk.
My Key competences
- Skilled in language and text production + analysis
- Content Strategy
- Structures, personas, scenarios and benchmarking
- User testing and involvement, workshops and usability testing
- Organisation: taxonomy, categorisation, labelling, findability, SEO and metadata
- Interface design: prototyping, wireframing, sketching
- User needs, environments, cultures and ecologies
- Heuristic and expert evaluation
- Inter-cultural communication and organisational knowledge
- Strong sense of entrepreneurship (for more see ‘Projects’)
- Project management (e.g. theoretical and some practical experience with Scrum)
- Agile development
My Technical Competences
- Extensive CMS experience (mainly Drupal, MOSS, WordPress, Typo3 and Joomla)
- Programming with HTML and PHP
- Styling with CSS
- Editing with Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign
- Photos editing with Pixelmator and Adobe Lightroom
- Wireframing in OmniGraffle Professional and Adobe Fireworks, Mockingbird and other live-wireframing tools
- Diagramming with Mindjet MindManager
- Usability testing (incl. working with the software Silverback
- Basic level understanding of Flash and ActionScript 3
- Basic level understanding of Javascript and jQuery
